Teaching Presence in an Online Collaborative Learning Environment via Facebook

This study aims to explore the interactions of the teacher with her six students in an online collaborative learning environment to complete their narrative writing task. Data sources were the online interactions archives and the teacher’s reflection. The interactions were coded based on the descriptors related to teaching presence in the Community of Inquiry (CoI) model by Garrison, Archer and Anderson (2000). Findings indicated that the descriptors suggested by the CoI model were present in the interactions. The interactions related to the teaching presence encouraged students to improve their narrative writing. Additionally, other descriptors such as code-switching, exam-centeredness and teachercentredness were also evident in the data. The teacher’s reflection indicates that interacting in online collaborative learning is a good practice to encourage narrative writing.